Learning goals and performance goals are both beneficial to an employee. Performance goals typically garner more attention because supervisors work with employees to develop ones that are focused on workplace accomplishments. Learning goals, meanwhile, center on an employee's desire to improve his skills and abilities to achieve higher levels of performance in the workplace. When effective, learning goals offer long-term benefits to the employee and employer.

Increased Potential

Performance goals are an idealistic view of your current abilities, while learning goals help increase your performance potential. By enhancing current skills, you increase what you can deliver in the future. For instance, a new salesperson may have a monthly quota of $100,000 in sales. He may set learning goals to improve his prospecting approach and conversation percentage. If successful, his performance goals may increase to $125,000, $150,000 or more after a few months.

Long-Term Focus

Learning goals place a higher priority on long-term development and success, whereas performance goals drive accomplishments for a stated period of time. A service rep may have a performance goal of 95 percent customer satisfaction and learning goals aimed at increasing response time and communication skills. Achieving his 95 percent satisfaction score is nice in the short term, but to advance in his career or command more money, he needs to learn more to perform better over time.

Motivation

Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck, a pioneer in discussing the differences between the two types of goals, stressed that learning goals tend to give you a stronger sense of empowerment. When you fail at performance goals, a common response is a feeling of failure, inadequacy or helplessness. When you have a good balance with strong learning goals, you feel more comfortable that you are developing skills necessary to eventually reach your lofty performance objectives.

Better Careers

Individuals focused on learning goals emphasize knowledge and skill acquisition as primary to achieving higher levels of performance, according to the June 2006 "Ivey Business Journal." In your career, establishing learning goals in areas of strengths and weaknesses helps you grow into a more valuable and flexible employee. This increases your ability to gain promotions and pay raises and to make career changes based on your improvements in certain skill areas.

About the Author

Neil Kokemuller has been an active business, finance and education writer and content media website developer since 2007. He has been a college marketing professor since 2004. Kokemuller has additional professional experience in marketing, retail and small business. He holds a Master of Business Administration from Iowa State University.